Serendipity generator: a guide to treasure hunting
“I know he is a good general, but is he lucky?” Napoleon.
Larry Ellison was at one point the richest man in America. Yet when he was in his late 20s, his first wife left him because she thought he’s a ‘loser’ who didn’t work hard enough. Jack Ma is the most powerful entrepreneur in China. Yet he was rejected by dozens of jobs, including the KFC. Surprisingly, both stories are not uncommon. If we look at the biographies of the most successful people, we will find that many of them were dismissed as failures who would never amount to anything. And that’s even the case with unicorn companies. Some tech investors were so sure of Google’s path to failure, that they went out of their way to hide from the Google founders in social gatherings to avoid ‘awkward conversations’.
How can this be? That we humans are so bad at evaluating possibilities, yet so damn confident of our ability. That we can’t give away billion dollar offers without rejections after rejections.
Black hole was thought to be impossible to image. That changed in 2019.
One interpretation might be that people are short sighted. But this doesn’t seem to be the case for the tech investors who typically appreciate the long term potential.
An alternative explanation might be that extraordinary outcomes are luck driven, that no one could have ever predicted them. Yet to me, this is rather unsatisfying because humans do have agency and some people are clearly better at creating extraordinary opportunities than others.
Instead, a more interesting hypothesis is that amazing opportunities are by their very nature ‘illegible’ to most people. Like a comet, certain possibilities are only visible for a moment in time and may not be seen again in our lifetime. Because they are by definition unusual, they cannot be observed by our existing mental frameworks. As the ancient Chinese proverb said, ‘The Tao that can be named is not the Tao’. Instead, extraordinary opportunities are mysteries hidden in higher dimensional spaces, hidden from our ‘normal’ ways of thinking. As explored previously, certain possibilities only become visible, when our mindsets and the objects are aligned at the right dimensions.
The advice, “The harder I work, the luckier I get” is low tech. It presumes a world lack of mysteries. But as we all know, life is short. There are costs to spending 10000 hours on one thing.
Instead, the ‘luck’ that most people want is getting surprisingly good outcomes given the same effort.
As the science fiction writer Arthur Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
What’s valuable is a technology for getting lucky that opens up possibilities.
That’s what I’d love to build here: a serendipity generator.
I’d like to explore the science of serendipity. A technology that gives us more leverage than trading time for output. Something that helps us transcend zero sum games and switch on possibilities previously inconceivable.
You may be thinking, that’s impossible, that’s too good to be true. But what I’m proposing here is actually what life has already done on planet earth. It is what has already happened since the Big Bang. And we don’t have to dig deep to find that the history of inventions is filled with lucky, unexpected discoveries that transformed everything.
It turns out that unforeseeable, black swan like events happen all the time. Whatever the underlying mechanisms, myriads of new possibilities have continued to emerge.
What would the world look like if all of us has a serendipity generator?
Perhaps, the genius of Napoleon is in recognising that his lucky general has some magical combinations of qualities that can’t be easily explained, but is priceless to possess.
In The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb suggested that it is invaluable living in big cities because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters.
“Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity.”
Now, if you are a sexy social butterfly, this would be a powerful strategy. There is a good chance that networks and opportunities will magically emerge around you wherever you go.
But what if you are an introverted outsider? Did Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg get lucky in parties as young men? Did they even want to get invited?
Just like there are different niches for making a living, it seems that serendipity generators can be different depending on your backgrounds.
What if we could open source serendipity?
To start off, here are my 3 suggestions. I’d love to hear how serendipities happened in your life.
1. Curiosity about magic
To me, the primary driver for finding luck is curiosity about the unknowns.
Believing is seeing. When Einstein first proposed the theory of relativity, it was only a mathematical curiosity. Few people understood its validity, let alone imagined that there could ever be any practical uses. But now, we have GPS because of it. This in turn opened up possibilities for Google Map, Uber and even driverless cars.
To unlock unexpected possibilities, it helps to believe that there are magic hidden underneath the surface, yet to be discovered, however counterintuitive the paths to them might be. It took nearly 50 years from conceiving the Hubble Space Telescope to making it happen. Without curiosity that is seemingly irrational, breakthrough opportunities would be nipped in the bud, dismissed as ‘useless’, before having a chance to flourish.
2. With an open ended lever, you can create a Universe
Archimedes was right. Leverage is powerful. And the way to generate luck is to have options with asymmetric, open ended upsides. This principle is mathematically proven (e.g. see the Barbell strategy by Nassim Taleb) and already adopted by billionaire investors. It is even consistent with the observation that the Universe seems to be a never ending generator of open ended possibilities, from hydrogen atoms to galaxies, from single prokaryotic cell to complex organisms.
But how can we implement this concept in life?
Host parties. Talk to strangers. Go on first dates. Help lonely people. Be surprisingly empathetic. Learn something new. Experience a different culture. Have an exciting project. Connect people together. Give a talk. Walk in interesting areas.
These are all seeds of possibilities we can plant in our everyday life. However, we don’t have all the time in the world. What if we could get robots to plant the seeds for us when we sleep?
It turns out we can do exact that with the internet. Today, the most powerful lever seems to be having a web presence, whether it’s through code or media, an App or a Youtube Channel (See ‘How to Get Rich’ by Naval Ravikant). And just like the Big Bang, the web is open ended in possibility generation.
Here are just some benefits of having a web presence in generating serendipity:
Permission-less. You have the freedom to experiment with counterintuitive ideas that would be laughed at in a committee.
Zero marginal cost of replication. The robots in the backend will tirelessly help you with marketing your message, especially if your content is robot friendly.
Mining hidden opportunities. Your website can connect potential friends and opportunities that are otherwise hard to find.
Diverse feedback. You can learn from people with radically different perspectives.
Instant credibility. A beautifully crafted website is an honest signal of good taste that can’t be faked.
3. Playing in a new dimension
One of the most intriguing ideas I have ever come across is that having goals can be counterproductive. As shown in computer simulations by AI researchers Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman, sometimes, amazing possibilities can only be discovered by not looking for them because the stepping stones leading to them are counterintuitive.
As a wild analogy, it doesn’t matter how ambitious monkeys set goals in climbing trees, they will never reach outer space by doing so. Yet, reaching beyond the atmosphere is not impossible for those seemingly lazy monkeys who daydream all day about mathematics, after millions of years of evolution.
Goals are like powerful lighthouses that direct our attention. But if we only search for keys under obvious, well-lit places, we would miss out seemingly useless stepping stones in the darkness.
Instead, we are more likely to unveil lucky opportunities by pursuing what feels interesting. What do flute, music box, mechanical loom, vacuum tube, discrete mathematics, war, calligraphy have in common? It turned out they all played a role in the history of computers, which would have been too inconceivable to set a goal for. As Steven Johnson beautifully shown, it is surprising how significant play has changed the course of history.
But how can we direct our attention without goals? Well, the bigger question is how did evolution create life on earth without an objective? What created the open ended evolutionary process that generated everything?
This is one of the grand mysteries of science.
But a hint might be keep playing with something new. Or what Ken Stanley called the ‘novelty search’ algorithm. By doing something new, this strategy facilitates open ended explorations in higher dimensions, and opens up lucky possibilities beyond our imagination.